I knew things were a bit more serious than my original reckoning when I realized that over half of the skin of my bottom lip had come off in a single piece. Stupid, stupid girl; what in the previous twenty-four hours had failed to convince me that I'd had a major lapse in self-control? Did the insomnia and the twenty-four hours of shakes not serve as warning enough?

Stupid, stupid girl.

Day two of caffeine withdrawal. On the phone last night, in the middle of something that smelled halfway between chastisement and argument, I admitted to the voice on the other end of the phone that I should probably start treating caffeine with the same wary respect that most people give to alcohol.

"When I said 'get your heart rate down,' I meant it, and now. Don't make me haul you off this machine and beat you." - Laura-the-trainer

In the week I've been working out, I've learned about as much about Laura-the-trainer as she has learned about me. Although I cannot definitively say what her waist size is (knowledge that she has about me), I can say one thing for her: she appreciates mornings almost as much as I do.

Which is to say, not at all.If I come in for an early workout, our exchanges are often more grunted than spoken. But she's there, and I'm there, and that's apparently what counts. However, when awake, she is fearsome.

I'd just finished curling my biceps into entertaining little squiggles and moved on to the triceps machine when Laura materialized to my left. She was grinning, in that particular I-have-an-evil-secret way that I've learned to recognize after less than a week.

"You'll never believe what I did last night."

Me: "I think I'm gonna need a fourth day at two sets."

Laura: "Second set giving you issues?"

Me: "Yeah, on a few exercises. I can do the first set of the bicep curls with no problem, but I usually have to stop somewhere around the sixth rep of the second set. Only way I can finish it out is to stop between each rep to take a breath. Is it going to be better to drop down in weight or to add in another day or two for me to really adjust to this weight?"

Sometimes we don't slip through life quite so unnoticed as we might like to think.

For now, Wednesdays are my most difficult days at the gym. Each Wednesday, I either increase all exercises in my weight training regimen by one set, or am on the receiving end of a new weight training regimen from Laura-the-trainer.

I'm at the beginning of week three. On my first day, Laura walked with me from machine to machine, demonstrating how they were used and adjusted. (At 5'1½", I am by far one of the shortest people using these machines, and most machines have to be adjusted down to accommodate torsos, arms, and legs as short as mine.) She coached me through each machine, trying to determine how much weight I could handle on each machine.For most machines, a set is fifteen reps; machines working abdominal and back muscles get 20 reps each. On that first day, I struggled to complete one set on each machine.